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All the scientists’ calculations cannot cope with the unpredictability of nature. We do not know when the next devastating eruption will occur. Many volcanologists are still haunted by the memory of failures of volcanic prediction, tragic failures that cost the lives of more than 20,000 people in one gigantic eruption.
In 1976 the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe hears a terrifying warning. Volcanologists say that the islands massive La Soufrière volcano may soon erupt. They report that gas pressure is building up, and the authorities heed the scientists’ grim warning, 72,000 people are evacuated at a cost of millions of dollars. For four months the capital city of Basse-Terre is left as a ghost town. As the scientists continue to monitor the volcano that looms over the area houses are abandoned and desperate farm animals roam the streets looking for food. But the scientists have got it wrong, La Soufrière never did violently erupt.
Less than a decade later that failed prediction comes back to haunt volcanologists, when smoke starts rising from the 17,000 foot snow covered summit of Nevado del Ruiz in Colombia. Scientist warn that a likely eruption will send volcanic floods of melted snow and ice towards nearby towns. This time the scientists have got it right, but the authorities do not order a full evacuation. The volcano erupts in November 1985 and the predicted floods bury the entire town of Armero under a sea of grey ash and mud. An estimated 23,000 people die, 4,500 are injured, and 8,000 made homeless.
The disaster perfectly illustrates the dilemma facing all volcano scientists, cry wolf too often and nobody listens, fail to issue a strong enough warning, and thousands may die.
Their task is of vital importance as many of the 1500 active volcanoes on the planet currently are still considered utterly unpredictable, killing an average of 800 people per year, and threatening 500 million more who live near potentially dangerous volcanoes.
Clip taken from the Naked Science documentary “Volcano Alert”.
Watch it here – http://youtu.be/xVRlL2gd4Fc

Photograph Descriptions
Jewish prisoners after being liberated from a death train, 1945
It’s Friday, the 13th of April, 1945. A few miles northwest of Magdeburg there was a railroad siding in wooded ravine not far from the Elbe River. Major Clarence L. Benjamin in a jeep was leading a small task force of two light tanks on a routine job of patrolling. The unit came upon some 200 shabby looking civilians by the side of the road. There was something immediately apparent about each one of these people, men and women, which arrested the attention. Each one of them was skeleton thin with starvation, a sickness in their faces and the way in which they stood-and there was something else. At the sight of Americans they began laughing in joy-if it could be called laughing. It was an outpouring of pure, near-hysterical relief. The tankers soon found out why. The reason was found at the railroad siding.
Omayra Sanchez, young victim of the Armero Tragedy in Colombia, 1985
On November 13, 1985, the Nevado del Ruiz volcano erupted. Pyroclastic flows exploding from the crater melted the mountain’s icecap, forming lahars (volcanic mudflows and debris flows) which cascaded into river valleys below. One lahar, consisting of three pulses, did most of the damage. Traveling at 6 meters (20 ft) per second, the first pulse enveloped most of the town of Armero, killing up to 20,000 people; the two later pulses weakened buildings. Another lahar killed 1,800 people in nearby Chinchiná. In total 23,000 people were killed and 13 villages in addition to Armero were destroyed.
Bloody Saturday - a crying Chinese baby amid the bombed-out ruins of Shanghai's South Railway Station, 1937
“Bloody Saturday” – Depicting a Chinese baby crying within the bombed-out ruins of Shanghai South Railway Station, the photograph became known as a cultural icon demonstrating Japanese wartime atrocities in China. Taken a few minutes after a Japanese air attack on civilians during the Battle of Shanghai, Hearst Corporation photographer H. S. “Newsreel” Wong, did not discover the identity or even the sex of the injured child, whose mother lay dead nearby. One of the most memorable war photographs ever published, and perhaps the most famous newsreel scene of the 1930s, the image stimulated an outpouring of western anger against Japanese violence in China. Journalist Harold Isaacs called the iconic image “one of the most successful propaganda pieces of all time”.
John F. Kennedy Jr. salutes his father’s casket in Washington, 1963
In the wake of JFK’s assassination, people around the world mourned and tried to come to terms with John F. Kennedy’s death. Many found solace in the stoic Kennedy clan. Lead by the dignified and unbreakable Jackie Kennedy following the family adage of “Kennedy’s don’t cry”, people ached for her as she and the Kennedy family refused to break down. The youngest member of the Kennedy family three-year old, John F Kennedy Jr. or John-John was no exception. As the casket left St. Matthew’s Cathedral on its way to the President’s final resting place JFK Jr. stepped forward and raised his small hand in salute, an image that broke the hearts of millions. Photographer Dan Farrell, who took the photo, called it “the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life”.
A KKK child and a black State Trooper meet each other, 1992
The Trooper is black. Standing in front of him and touching his shield is a curious little boy dressed in a KKK hood and robe. In this picture innocence is mixed with hate, the irony of a black man protecting the right of white people to assemble in protest against him.